The invention relates to a method for providing information about an object sensed in a surrounding area of a motor vehicle, in which the surrounding area is sensed using a sensor device of the motor vehicle. A piece of information is provided on a communication interface in the motor vehicle. Moreover, the invention relates to a method for producing a map of the surrounding area for a surrounding area of a motor vehicle, in which the map of the surrounding area is created on the basis of information that is sensed using a sensor device of the motor vehicle and is provided on a communication interface. Furthermore, the invention also relates to a computer program product. Further, the invention also relates to a sensor device for a motor vehicle, having at least one sensor and a control unit, wherein the sensor device is configured to provide information about an object sensed in a surrounding area of the motor vehicle on a communication interface in the motor vehicle. Moreover, the invention also relates to a processing device for producing a map of the surrounding area using a sensor device. Furthermore, the invention also relates to a motor vehicle having a sensor device and/or a processing device.
DE 10 2006 049 626 A1 discloses a method for determining the position and the geometric extent of an object in surroundings of a motor vehicle. The assignment of a measured value to a population of an object is performed therein using a gate method or using the Mahalanobis distance.
Furthermore, DE 10 2009 045 286 A1 discloses a method for mapping surroundings of a motor vehicle. In that case, there is provision for detected objects to be respectively described using two coordinate points and a positional fuzziness associated with the respective coordinate point. These coordinate points and the positional fuzziness are stored as data in an interface that can be accessed by the driver assistance system of the vehicle. So that the data can be used by driver assistance systems, a general object interface is necessary that can be used to describe the properties of the object.
The known methods allow the assessment of an affiliation of a sensing point only to a limited degree, which means that there is an accompanying applicable degree of inaccuracy. This is, particularly then, also disadvantageous for the actual object rating and hence also, consequently, for further statements, for example regarding a clearance between an object and the motor vehicle and/or regarding entry of such an object into a map of the surroundings. Not least, the provision of information on a cited interface in the prior art is worthy of improvement, since firstly there is only broad and fairly unspecific, fairly uncustomized, particularly in respect of further processing or forwarding, information on hand and secondly the evaluation complexity for the information that is already provided on this interface is relatively high.
The approach known from the prior art involves only relatively inaccurate information being provided for a very general interface. This results in the provided data on hand resulting in only relatively inaccurate statements about the object and therefore having only limited suitability for the further processing or use of driver assistance systems. Furthermore, a general interface of this kind that more or less already manages the actual connection to the rest of the vehicle network and hence also to the driver assistance systems with the controllers thereof has only conditional suitability. The reason is that an interface that therefore has disadvantages such as compatibility problems in regard to connection to other vehicle-manufacturer-specific controllers and networks can in this case be provided only globally for all the information to be provided that is on hand. Furthermore, the individual provision of information already preprocessed on an individual basis on this general interface is not possible. This also results in losses and compatibility problems when controllers for vehicles of different vehicle manufacturers are also meant to be connected to the communication interface.